Word: oscars
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...year career as a director of television and movie dramas, his signature achievement was the 1962 film version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The picture - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids...
...broke, broken-down fighter stoked Wrestler-mania at the Toronto Film Festival and, before that, in Venice, where the film had its world premiere (winning the top prize). That was back in early September, when the Los Angeles Times headlined the question: "Will The Wrestler get hold of an Oscar for Mickey Rourke...
...face and body with the scars of war - to play a has-been fighter hoping for a last shot at the big time. It's the kind of punishment that won kudos for Lon Chaney and Paul Muni in the old days and helped Robert De Niro to an Oscar in Raging Bull playing Jake LaMotta. (He got himself into fighting shape, then he gained a ton of weight! Acting!) One more because: Rourke does strong, sensitive work here, which will cheer his old-time admirers and win him new fans. All praise to him, and to Darren Aronofsky...
...that he alchemizes the dross of the script into a character with a palpable physicality and inner life. Behind the bulk of his hulk, a man's dogged decency is on display, and so, briefly, is Rourke's fallen-angel smile. In the scene that could cinch his Oscar nomination, he gets a long close-up as Randy pours out his clumsy love for his daughter. The speech is boilerplate sentiment, which the actor - who says he reworked it to reflect his own life - elevates to a passion as sweet as it is forlorn. (The speech is up there with...
...this for Soderbergh: among all contemporary American directors, he has the most restless ambitions. Since his debut film, the indie romantic comedy sex, lies, and videotape in 1989, he has won an Oscar (for directing Traffic), guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (the Ocean's films). More important, he's let his interests range far and wide, across different genres and different kinds of movies: intellectual science fiction (Solaris), quirky ensemble comedy (Full Frontal) and defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience's prejudices...